When is a slave no longer a slave?
Is it when she thinks she is free?
Is it when time no longer has relevancy?
No, the twenty-first century
Does not free me.
When there’s a pandemic and I become
The most essential worker in your economy
Nursing the old in your old folk homes
And ringing up your grocery
And then I die disproportionately
Am I free?
Or am I still your mammie?
When is a slave no longer a slave?
Is it when she thinks she is free?
Or does it depend on what you expect from me?
What you tell me is my responsibility?
To hold up the Community.
From organizing to tending to baptizing
To showing up to see the incarcerated
And serving your needs of intimacy
Without choosing or salary or thank you
If a no is beyond possibility
Then is a yes really a yes?
When did I get free?
Or Am I now the Universal Mammie?
When is a slave no longer a slave?
Is it when she thinks she is free?
After forced breeding to fuel an economy
To now high maternal mortality
Suffering malaise from the weight
Of your systemically racist society
Your state sponsored violent policy
To deny me a wage to live decently
Housing me in your public
plantation shanty equivalency
Slave mammie is living among you
And you don’t even see me.
But here we come dragging our chains
Into the twenty-first century.
Am I as invisible as she
Is sanitized and imaginary?
When is a State no longer a purveyor of slavery?
If you wash your hands does that mean you are free?
What you still expect from me
I think that is the skeleton key.
You want mammie’s lap and the lullaby
But you still after so many years
Don’t celebrate setting me free
Begrudge my indemnity
My equal opportunity
YOU enslaved ME!
And now have the nerve
To call me a welfare queen!
You keep your knee on the neck
Of the multigenerational me
Then ask why do I protest
Why I can’t breathe.
Honey, mammie can’t rock you to sleep no more.
Mammie is angry.
Mammie is here in the street.
Just saying free me.
Fix this shit and
Free ME.
Rhea Harmsen
Fourth of July, 2020
(Note: Mammie is an imaginary white creation not grounded in historical fact but that has, nevertheless, infected the collective American psyche).
Rhea Harmsen 
Yes! You are the “pupil of the eye” that truth shines through, my dear sister!
Love your language!
This is good – it sums it all up – all the ways in which we suffer under the weight of enslavement. It is forever true for now.